Fool's Gould

The popular writings of Stephen Jay Gould were never very popular with me. I'm sure he knew more biology than I'll ever dream about, but I often got the sense he was hand-waving in his more contentious arguments. And now the NY Times reveals that he went beyond hand-waving. He simply dreamed up his evidence for a charge of racism:

In a 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man,” the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould asserted that Morton, believing that brain size was a measure of intelligence, had subconsciously manipulated the brain volumes of European, Asian and African skulls to favor his bias that Europeans had larger brains and Africans smaller ones.

But now physical anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania, which owns Morton’s collection, have remeasured the skulls, and in an article that does little to burnish Dr. Gould’s reputation as a scholar, they conclude that almost every detail of his analysis is wrong.

A Wisconsin paleontologist offers this opinion:

Some of Gould's mistakes are outrageous, with others it is hard for me to believe that the misstatements were not deliberate misrepresentations.

Gould is gone, but Wikipedia has this to say about his politics:

In describing his own political views, he has said they "tend to the left of center." According to Gould the most influential political books he read were C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite and the political writings of Noam Chomsky.

People who stare at the evolutionary process, often start thinking that some individuals of a species may be more "fit" than others. This is the sort of thing that stirs doubts in the hearts of contemporary egalitarians. I always had the sense that Gould was struggling to suppress such dangerous thoughts, in others and in himself.

Unjustified charges of bias by race
are vicious and base.